Poety Response 2: A Chinese Bowl by Katha Pollitt

I have never been the genius child, but when my parents said to me on Thursday, "Oh, by the way Mandee, we're going to Utah this weekend," even I knew what they were really trying to say was, "Hopefully you didn't procrastinate your poetry blog this week otherwise you'll be stuck doing it at 10:15 on a Saturday night in a log cabin where you'll barely be able to access the internet let alone get your blog to load in less than fifteen minutes or so." Nevertheless, here I am.
We discussed "A Chinese Bowl" in class on Thursday and I decided then this was my favorite poem in the packet. (I will try my best to only say that once.) But no, I really did enjoy it. Katha Pollitt has such an incredible writing style! Her poem speaks of growing up, but she cleverly never blatantly says she is aging. She speaks of a filing cabinet not yet filled with the woes of adulthood. I especially love the lines:
as rain about to fall,
part love, part concentration,
part inner solitude.
Where is that room, those gray-

green thin-lined
scribbled papers
littering the floor?
How did

I move so far away
just living day by day
that now all rooms seem strange,
the years all error?

So many times I think we look back at our lives and wonder if we did everything wrong, "the years all error?" Our childhood generally seems so simple and perfect. Wouldn't it be nice to go back to the rooms of our home and have everything be simple again. To live without regrets and worries.
Just after those stanzas above, Pollitt uses an entire line to write "bowl" on the far right of the page. We discussed this in class and Joey Lopez thought it was because as a child bowls are harder to reach or something like that. I disagree. Seeing as our childhood seems simple, simple things represent childhood to us; a chinese bowl, or a blanket, a toy, a chair. As we grow up, we understand life less and less. Our paridigms become skewed, our logic flawed and the simple joys of life are harder to reach. What once represented what we "think is happiness" as the poem states, becomes only a stationary object and our expectations of happiness supposedly expand, when in all actuality, are decayed by regrets and failure.